new season
 

Andromeda...first episode of the new season......I am completely confused.
How did he end up on that planet? Wasn't he in the slip fighter when he entered that thing that looks like a windows 95 screen saver.. route of ages?... how did Rhade get there before him?....Is it Tarn Vedra or what? can somebody explain what the hell is going on.....

Andromeda has the tendency to be nothing but confusing and provide little explanation to remedy that confusion. The following is my best guess on explanations, though most of it is stuff pulled out of my own mind and not exactly stuff fully stated in the episode.

If you haven't seen the first episode of the fifth season but plan on it, do not read any further lest ye be spoiled.

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Dylan took the slipfighter into the Route of Ages and somehow ended up dumped out on that planet. How Rhade ended up there months before Dylan did is not explained. My best guess as to how Rhade got there is he was in a piece of that space station Arkology and was propelled into the Route of Ages himself when Trance whent nova to destroy the Magog Worldship. That's just my guess though, all we got as way of an explanation is that he turned to the doorway to see Magog and then a bright light flashed over him. Chances are we won't get any more of an explanation than that going off of how little the writers ever explain anything in this show.

Who knows with this show if it truly is Tarn Vedra or not. Maybe it is the real Tarn Vedra. Maybe it's a Tarn Vedra in a different reality. Maybe it's not Tarn Vedra at all. I imagine the writers could choose to eventually write it anyway they want to. Going off of this episode alone, we have to assume right along with Dylan that it is indeed Tarn Vedra. We know that Tarn Vedra was seperated from all the slipstream routes from earlier episodes, but we didn't know how. Maybe being placed in the Route of Ages or something was that how. Personally, if it is Tarn Vedra, I think it sucks. Tarn Vedra was the heart of the old Commonwealth and the home of the Vedrans. It was a capital planet. What we saw in "The Weight" looked like some lowly populated backwater world the populous of which wasn't incredibly intelligent people but near lunatics with such a low level of self-awareness that a babbling guy skilled in facial contortions could trick them into doing whatever he wanted just by saying it said to do so in a book that was in reality blank pages. Those sorts of people are not the people I imagined to be living on the capital planet of the old Commonwealth.

I wonder if it does truly turn out to be Tarn Vedra if we'll get to see any Vedrans. Personally, I thought the Vedrans were rather interesting aliens and have always wanted them to pop back up again.

But ultimately, who the heck knows. The writers are so near schizophrenic when it comes to writing episodes of this show that I find attempting to follow plot from one episode to the next to usually be a waste of time.

Thanks